ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

An "Eastern Scientific Revolution": Somatic Science and the Epistemic Instability of Post-Mao China (1979-1999)

• In Event: Science and Technology in Post-1949 China

English Abstract

Why was post-Mao China characterized by epistemic instability? This article examines the intellectual history of somatic science (Renti kexue), a contested science of unexplained bodily capacities promoted by the country’s most prominent scientist Qian Xuesen since 1981. The contrasting perceptions of somatic science, ranging from an “Eastern Scientific Revolution” to “the greatest pseudoscience movement in contemporary China,” make it an ideal case to examine the post-Mao epistemic chaos. This article argues that somatic science and the dissolving knowledge boundaries associated with it were both underpinned by a deeper conceptual reconfiguration of the Eastern, the scientific, and the revolutionary in the post-Mao quest for modernization. The epistemic fluidity in the aftermath of Maoism enabled Qian to synthesize Traditional Chinese Medicine, cybernetics, and the Engelsian doctrine of “labor created humanity” into a hybrid framework, in which the human body became a complex system with undeveloped potentials including psychic powers. Facing orthodox gatekeepers, somatic scientists invoked Kuhnian and Maoist revolutionary teachings to reframe native traditions as anomalies capable of catalyzing paradigm shifts. This vision promised an alternative path to scientific modernity without subscribing to a normative West. However, once China's ancient wisdom was empowered to revolutionize established science, the dissolved boundaries could not be selectively restored, and heterodoxies that proliferated eventually consumed the very science that had unwittingly enabled them. This article concludes that epistemic instability arose precisely from the plurality of how post-Mao contemporaries reconfigured dominant concepts, envisioned paths to modernity, and drew knowledge boundaries to sustain their visions—a plurality often obscured by reductive narratives of science prevailing over pseudoscience.

Author

• Yanlin Lu, Princeton University